higher than the empire state
by andthenshesaid
Summary: "Gone like mental, Karin whispers to him in homeroom, gone like schizo, gone like gone." SasuNaru.


**higher than the empire state**

/

"You know you shouldn't be here, Sasuke."

And Sasuke thinks about that, for a bit.

Before, probably not. Before he actually got here, he was probably mostly fine. Before the white-washed walls and sickly yellow flowers and little blonde boys with wild eyes.

But after –

After he needed this sick-sick-sick place more than the girl with the sharp eyes who tried to off herself about three times a week. (Last week, she'd slashed open some scars with a paperclip in the dining hall, and there was more blood than he thinks a paperclip should cause.)

Still, Kakashi – his silver-haired psychiatrist with the blank eyes and the wide smirk – doesn't exactly expect an answer. He's Sasuke Uchiha and Uchiha's don't talk and they don't do feelings and they don't spill their innermost secrets to men who hide porn books behind their orange-and-green psychology books.

So instead he lifts up his arm and rolls his eyes.

The scars haven't even begun to fade.

/

He realizes, somewhere, in the back of his head, that they are making out on the grave of someone that he doesn't know – the stone says something like Haku, just one word and it's dreadfully bare, and maybe it makes Sasuke wonder what his will say when he's gone, like _beloved son and friend _or maybe just _an asshole who died for no reason _ – and that Naruto is probably thinking about his dead mother's ashes and also that Naruto is kissing _him_, when he's pretty sure it should be the other way around.

/

(If he were some kind of poet, he might say that Naruto is some kind of bright, blinding planet in the dark morning sky that is his existence, but poets use words and Uchiha's don't, so he doesn't.)

/

That day, at dinner, Naruto doesn't eat.

Just sits listlessly and uses his fork to draw swirls into the mashed potatoes.

Sasuke scoops it off when the staff isn't looking and chokes down the lukewarm chicken and green beans.

It's disgusting, but if the nurses find out Naruto isn't eating, they'll put him into isolation again and that – that won't… Naruto can't deal with isolation.

(The last time Naruto went into isolation he came out with a corpse's skin and fingernail marks up his arm and red ringed eyes and he didn't stop murmuring about foxes and death for three and a half days.)

/

Sasuke arrived at Leaf Mental Hospital on a Tuesday morning. Itachi had gripped his right arm – the arm without the scars, because if that arm is gripped right enough blood would spill out like hell – and turned him over to the nurses with a quick promise to "bring Shishui and mother and father and maybe Karin" to visit.

(There's no emotion, no goodbye – the promise is relayed from his mother.)

(They are Uchiha's.)

A nurse – this one with short pink hair and wide green eyes and a smile that reminds Sasuke of his mother – gives him a quick onceover and tells him the procedures – _isolation until it's decided you're not a danger to others, different levels are different privileges, group therapy when you're out of isolation, change out of those clothes into _these _clothes, keep those bandages tight and clean _– and he almost listens.

He remembers thinking about how there was a boy inside with electric eyes who didn't have anyone to visit and he choked down the nausea he felt when another nurse – this one a guy with dark spiky hair and a lazy smirk – had led him into his psychiatrist's office.

/

The pink haired nurse comes in – three times a day.

Puts his meal – always the same sandwich and applesauce and glass of water without ice, and always remembers to ask the stupid inane questions that his mother used to teach him.

Sasuke doesn't reply.

He wonders how many days it takes to die.

/

When he was younger – younger and the world was filled with all things sunshine and electric blue and he used to go over to a redhead's house every day.

She used to serve cheap ramen and kiss him on the forehead and drape colored scarves over different lamps. At Sasuke's house the lamps were brass and bathed the room in yellow-ish light. They all matched each other, except the one in his mother's room that used to be an oriental vase. He liked the colors at that house better.

Her husband was dead, but there was a picture of him on the mantle.

He looks remarkably like his son.

/

Sasuke falls in love.

/

It took him two weeks to get out of isolation – two weeks of staring at the same walls, two weeks of straining his hears for a brighter-than-sunshine voice and (not) talking to his psychiatrist.

Human brains, Sasuke knows, start to deteriorate minutes after being in solitary confinement. Changes in the chemistry. Twisted up, dead ruins of the inside of his head.

But, two weeks later, on another Tuesday – out the window he could see that it was raining, and he remembers that Naruto always hated rain – he slowly (on the outside, because on the inside, he's running – running so hard he can't breathe) follows the pink-haired nurse – Sakura, Sakura like stupid love songs and cherry blossoms – to the dining hall.

Sasuke scans the room with quick, black eyes – dark hair, brown hair, ponytails, scarlet, orange, his eye catches on one of white blonde and then –

It's golden and dirty and messy and _Naruto_.

/

"Naruto told me a story today."

Sasuke looks up from where he'd been absentmindedly playing with set of puzzles Kakashi kept scattered around his office.

"Who?"

He asked, and they both know he's lying.

/

"'Dobe." He whispered it, like some kind of prayer.

He's at the table faster than he can blink.

Naruto doesn't move and there is some kind of lump in his throat, and there are fingernail marks all over the blondes arm and Sasuke _can't_ breathe seeing Naruto like this – it's like the world is closing in on him and he would give anything-anything-anything to see a smile or a stupid grin or _anything_.

Naruto's face is blank-blank-blank.

/

He hides the pills underneath his tongue, but after careful consideration allows Naruto to take his, because they really do make that thing inside his head a little bit better.

Sasuke doesn't really consider the possibility that Naruto was doing okay without him, because he wasn't doing okay without Naruto and Naruto was never okay, not really and –

That's not the point.

The point is that he hides the pills under his tongue.

/

There was a blonde boy, sitting next to a grave.

It was sunny.

/

"He said, and Sasuke, you might want to listen to this, that he has a best friend. Kept calling him a bastard, though he did say he'd do anything for him. Said that the friend would do the same."

Sasuke sits.

Quietly.

Thinking something between wanting to hug Naruto and wanting to punch him in the face until he saw fucking stars.

He shrugs.

"Sounds like a stupid story, Kakashi."

/

"She's not even buried here." Naruto murmurs and Sasuke nods, because he knows that, but he was raised to know in which moments it was okay to tell someone the facts about their dead mother and where she was buried or whether her body was burned or not, and then there are other moments where it's not. "I just felt like thinking."

"Hn."

"Graveyards are a stupid place to think, aren't they?"

Sasuke doesn't answer, just grabs Naruto's hand and holds it, tight.

/

"You know, Sasuke, I'm not saying anything, or even possibly admitting that I have any opinion on what you're doing here, but he is doing better than he was when you weren't here."

He fixes his psychiatrist with the most level look he can manage. Kakashi stares back, with his stupid surgical mask and his creepy smile and his stack of orange literature that Sasuke doesn't think are textbooks.

Kakashi chuckles.

Sasuke wants to say something about how he's known Naruto since he was four and they had gotten into a fight on the playground. Wants to talk about how after he got his license, he and Naruto took off for nowhere and ended up drinking beer in a hospital parking lot. Wishes he could mention that time Naruto made him pancakes and they had some stupid food fight and wants to tell Kakashi that he loves Naruto more than anything, only he can't even say that stuff to himself let alone a crazy guy with silver hair.

"Really?" Is what he chokes out instead, and it's like Kakashi is laughing at him.

/

The next day – when Sasuke is still thinking about how Naruto kind of tasted like stars and moonshine and electricity –

Naruto is gone.

(Gone like mental, Karin whispers to him in homeroom, gone like schizo, gone like hospital, gone like _gone_.)

/

He sits down next to Naruto and grips his hand tight. Just like that day in the graveyard and that was two weeks and one day ago but it feels something like forever.

It's like a lifeline, maybe, but he's not really sure who it's for.

/

**someday i will write things that are not paragraphs/sentences seperated by dashes or periods and that actually have a plot. obviously not today though. **

**anyway. happy thursday. **

**please don't favorite without reviewing **


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